Common Core

At least one parent stood to express more targeted concerns. He was literally dragged and pushed out of the event. -Justin Katz

[Apr 2016]: With everyone being about four years into the implementation of common core curriculum which was built around the supposedly superior set of math and ELA standards that would make all children college and career ready, we would expect to see NAEP scores on the rise. However, the exact opposite is the case and the achievement gap is widening.

The 2015 NAEP scores were a political disaster for Common Core. Eighth grade math scores, for example, fell for the first time in NAEP’S 25 year history (down three points).

Researcher Ze’ev Wurman looked at several other indicators of student achievement and found none have improved since Common Core went into effect. In fact, SAT and ACT scores are slightly down. -Joy Pullmann

Last week the Brookings Institution issued the preliminary autopsy in its annual major report on education. It finds that American children are receiving objectively worse academic instruction because of Common Core, in two major respects: In the increase in nonfiction their teachers are assigning, and in a nationwide decline in students taking algebra in eighth grade.

Further, it finds that Common Core has done nothing to help children learn more overall, which was one of its supporters’ major claims: “there also is no evidence that CCSS has made much of a difference during a six-year period of stagnant NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores.” -Joy Pullmann

One mother commented, "I went to elementary school in Poland during communism. This is exactly what I was forced to learn."

College professors are joining the ever-growing ranks of those opposed to the Common Core educational standards...

"This rebellion among Kentucky math professors is likely a harbinger of things to come across the nation," write Robbins and McGroarty. "By and large, professors weren't consulted before their colleges and universities signed onto the Common Core scheme. They are only now beginning to understand that Common Core will result in hordes of unprepared students showing up in their freshman classes, and that the professors will be expected to relax or suspend course quality to hide the problem."

“The Reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I am given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn.” -Common Core Architect Dr. David Pook

A professor at Granite State College and chair of the history department at the Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire admitted to writing the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts in order to end white privilege.

King’s support of Common Core irritated not only Senator Gillibrand, but the leftist Network for Public Education, the New York State United Teachers union, and a gaggle of Republican congressmen — one of whom said that King’s unbending support for the Common Core curriculum had “resulted in the near-destruction of public education in New York State.”

Common Core’s failure should indict every single Common Core cheerleader and prompt a revival of genuine education reforms we’ve known for decades would actually help children but aren’t sexy to the consultant class that makes a living as “education innovators”... -Joy Pullmann

A teacher in Rapides Parish, in Alexandria, La., was “written up” for writing a negative post on Facebook about the controversial standards, according to Town Talk. “This is a hot national debate,” the teacher told the paper. “Why can’t I comment? I did not say a word about anything locally.”

Video surfaced on Thursday showing Michael Mulgrew, president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, as he unloaded a hateful rant against critics of the Common Core Standards Initiative. “If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say it is mine!” Mulgrew bellowed clownishly. “You do not take what is mine!” The union boss also challenged opponents of Common Core and union control over education to a fist fight. “I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers’!” Mulgrew threatened.

A Common Core-aligned elementary school homework assignment in a Jefferson County, Colorado school district tells children that by 2512, Kansas will be an oceanfront state, that the “Smokey” Mountains [sic] will become the “Smokey” Islands [sic], and that a sharp decline in the human population will take place, all due to man-made global warming.

According to Newsday, King defended his decision to immediately cancel forums near Buffalo, Utica, Albany, and on Long Island after receiving criticism at Spackenkill High School last Thursday. Parents and teachers expressed outrage at the state’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the standardized tests that are aligned with the new standards.

The New York City principals union has pulled a sexually explicit novel from its middle school curriculum that was recommended by the city’s Department of Education as part of its transition to the new Common Core State Standards. According to Phillissa Cramer writing at the blog GothamSchools, the novel, Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, alarmed members of the Council for School Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) who reviewed it. Union officials said the novel contained sexually explicit language and content.

Child safety advocates are fighting to reform the federal government’s common core English curriculum after parents complained about graphic sexual material in assigned material. Specifically, one novel on the Common Core list of recommended texts, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, portrays pedophilia in a sickeningly sympathetic light. Page 181: “The little girls are the only things I’ll miss. Do you know that when I touched their sturdy little t*** and bit them—just a little—I felt I was being friendly?—If I’d been hurting them, would they have come back? . . . they’d eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party.”

A sexually explicit novel geared for young adults may be considered recommended reading by Common Core proponents, but Sierra Vista Unified school administrators have decided to pull “Dreaming in Cuban” by Cristina Garcia from its approved reading list... Here’s an excerpt of the book’s most controversial passage, taken from page 80: “Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breast and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs...

Speaking on the evening of July 17 to a room of administrators and interested citizens at Grayslake School District 46, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, Curriculum Director Amanda August said that in the new system the correct answer is less important than “the procedure” of arriving at that answer. “But even under the new Common Core,” she says “if even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and oral explanations and they showed it in a picture but they just got the final number wrong; we’re really more focusing on the how and the why.”

[Oct 2017]: Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers.

The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better.

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland.

Joy Pullmann, "Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure"